Gallery Tour: Department of Indo-Pacific Art, Yale University Art Gallery

Established in 2009, the Department of Indo-Pacific Art oversees the newest collection at the Yale University Art Gallery. It has four areas of strength: ethnographic sculpture, Javanese gold from the prehistoric to late medieval periods, Indonesian textiles, and western Indonesian puppets.

The earliest materials in the department’s holdings are a collection of approximately 500 gold objects—coins, jewelry, statues, and ritual objects—from Central and East Java. The collection of puppets, the largest of its kind in the world, consists of more than 125 complete sets (a total of 20,000 puppets) from Java, Bali, Madura, and Lombok. The department holds more than 1,000 textiles from Southeast Asia, a collection that includes particularly superb examples from South Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Borneo, as well as rare and unique weavings that reflect the history of Indonesian designs.

In this gallery tour, Ruth Barnes, Thomas Jaffee Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, and Arielle Winnik, Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, will discuss objects on display in the galleries, which include sculpture and textiles from Sumatra, Borneo, and Eastern Indonesia, and gold, textiles, and puppets from Java.

Ruth Barnes is the inaugural Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, and a member of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies. She received her doctorate from Oxford University and was previously textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, where she organized exhibitions on Asian and Islamic textiles, early Indian Ocean trade, and the theme of pilgrimage. She was also curator of three new permanent-collection galleries for the Ashmolean’s reopening in 2009.

Arielle Winnik is the Donna Torrence Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a Phd in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University.